Elliot R. Wolfson (*1956 - )
(Professor Wolfson is author of several admirably deep and
thoughtful books. He is one of the leading scholars in the field of kabbalah,
mysticism and the phenomenology of mystical experience)
Today I want to present a passage about the problem of dream and the prolepsis of redemption from Professor Wolfson's brilliant and absolutely outstanding book "A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream. Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination" (Zone Books, New York 2011):
"The dream is a prolepsis of redemption, which is depicted as a seeing of the essence without any garment (beli levush), beholding the real, one might say, beyond the veil of metaphor. But Shneur Zalman and those who followed his path appropriated and elaborated the dialectic of disclosure and concealment enunciated by previous kabbalists, a dialectic especially conspicous in the sixteenth century, and thus they discerned that there can be no disclosure of the divine that is not concomitantly a concealment.
What is revealed is the infinite essence, but the infinite essence cannot be essentialized and remain the essence that is infinite; hence, what is revealed must always remain concealed, and the seeing without a garment amounts to seeing that there can be no seeing without a garment.
Utilizing apophatic modes of speech, it can be said of this essence that there "is no comprehension with respect to it" (ki ein bo shum tefisah), that is the "negation of thought" (afisat ha-ra'yon), the silence that is the "complete nullification of essence" (bittul ha-asmut mi-kol we-khol), the void (efes) that is "more than nothing" (mer eyder nisht), the "essential concealment that is not in existence at all, as it is also concealed itself" (he'lam ha-asmi she-eino bi-mesi'ut kelal we-hu he'lem gam le'asmo).
We can speak of the essence, so to speak, only to the extent that it is unspoken. The oneiric imagination is privileged, because the way to reach the unknowable and unnameable is through the mental faculty that combines opposites and thus points to the mystery of equanimity, the state of indifference wherein opposites are identical in their opposition.
Restoration to infinity - the mystical nuance of the traditional notion of repentance, teshuvah, which is etymologically from a root (shin waw beit) that means to return - is predicated on the removal of consciousness, which is indicative of exile, but also on the illumination of the supernal light, the vestment of concealment, since it is only by being concealed that the concealment can be revealed as concealed.
Through the dream, therefore, the schism between sleep and wakefulness, exile and redemption, is itself transcended in the luminal darkness where the difference between dark and light is no longer operative. Esoterically rendered, one will awaken to the dream no longer dreamt as a dream, the vision of truth imagined to be true."
- Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream. Zone Books 2011, p. 216-217
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(P.S. This photo is used with the very kind permission of Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson. Thank you very much)
